What’s the matter with ebooks? In our praise for print, we forget the great virtues of digital formats.

Do print versions still have an advantage over electronic formats? Ebook sales may be reaching a plateau but Dan Cohen argues there may be much more dark reading going on than the stats are showing. A huge and growing percentage of ebooks are being sold by indie publishers or authors themselves, and a third of them don’t even have ISBNs, the universal ID used to track most books, so these figures may be slow to catch up. Cohen suspects that we’re not going to have to wait very long for ebooks to become predominant.

Over the past two years I’ve been tracking ebook adoption, and the statistics are, frankly, perplexing. After Amazon released the Kindle in 2007, there was a rapid growth in ebook sales and readership, and the iPad’s launch three years later only accelerated the trend. Then something odd happened. By most media accounts, ebook adoption has plateaued at about a third of the overall book market, and this stall has lasted for over a year now. Some are therefore taking it as a Permanent Law of Reading: There will be electronic books, but there will always be more physical books. Long live print!

I read both e- and print books, and I appreciate the arguments about the native advantages of print. I am a digital subscriber to the New York Times, but every Sunday I also get the printed version. The paper feels expansive, luxuriant. And I do read more of it than the daily paper on my iPad, as many articles catch my eye and the flipping of pages requires me to confront pieces that I might not choose to read based on a square inch of blue-tinged screen. (Also, it’s Sunday. I have more time to read.) Even though I read more ebooks than printed ones at this point, it’s hard not to listen to the heart and join the Permanent Law chorus.

But my mind can’t help but disagree with my heart. Yours should too if you run through a simple mental exercise: jump forward 10 or 20 or 50 years, and you should have a hard time saying that the e-reading technology won’t be much better—perhaps even indistinguishable from print, and that adoption will be widespread. Even today, studies have shown that libraries that have training sessions for patrons with iPads and Kindles see the use of ebooks skyrocket—highlighting that the problem is in part that today’s devices and ebook services are hard to use. Availability of titles, pricing (compared to paperback), DRM, and a balkanization of ebook platforms and devices all dampen adoption as well.

How long will print be around? At a Loyola University gathering in New Orleans last week, the executive editor [of the Times], Dean Baquet, noted that he “has as much of a romance with print as anyone.” But he also admitted, according to a Times-Picayune report, that “no one thinks there will be a lot of print around in 40 years.”

Forty years is a long time, of course—although it is a short time in the history of the book. The big question is when the changeover will occur—next year, in five years, in Baquet’s 2055?

The tea leaves, even now, are hard to read, but I’ve come to believe that part of this cloudiness is because there’s much more dark reading going on than the stats are showing. Like dark matter, dark reading is the consumption of (e)books that somehow isn’t captured by current forms of measurement.

For instance, usually when you hear about the plateauing of ebook sales, you are actually hearing about the sales of ebooks from major publishers in relation to the sales of print books from those same publishers. That’s a crucial qualification. But sales of ebooks from these publishers is just a fraction of overall e-reading. By other accounts, which try to shine light on ebook adoption by looking at markets like Amazon (which accounts for a scary two-thirds of ebook sales), show that a huge and growing percentage of ebooks are being sold by indie publishers or authors themselves rather than the bigs, and a third of them don’t even have ISBNs, the universal ID used to track most books.

The commercial statistics also fail to account for free e-reading, such as from public libraries, which continues to grow apace. The Digital Public Library of America and other sites and apps have millions of open ebooks, which are never chalked up as a sale.

Similarly, while surveys of the young continue to show their devotion to paper, yet other studies have shown that about half of those under 30 read an ebook in 2013, up from a quarter of Millennials in 2011—and that study is already dated. Indeed, most of the studies that highlight our love for print over digital are several years old (or more) at this point, a period in which large-format, high-resolution smartphone adoption (much better for reading) and new all-you-can-read ebook services, such as Oyster, Scribd, and Kindle Unlimited, have emerged. Nineteen percent of Millennials have already subscribed to one of these services, a number considered low by the American Press Institute, but which strikes me as remarkably high, and yet another contributing factor to the dark reading mystery.

I’m a historian, not a futurist, but I suspect that we’re not going to have to wait anywhere near forty years for ebooks to become predominant, and that the “plateau” is in part a mirage. That may cause some hand-wringing among book traditionalists, an emotion that is understandable: books are treasured artifacts of human expression. But in our praise for print we forget the great virtues of digital formats, especially the ease of distribution and greater access for all—if done right.

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[…] Does ‘Dark Reading’ Mean a Bright Future for Ebooks? (LSE) One industry watcher isn’t deterred by news of print’s persistence and an ebook plateau: “The tea leaves, even now, are hard to read, but I’ve come to believe that part of this cloudiness is because there’s much more dark reading going on than the stats are showing. Like dark matter, dark reading is the consumption of (e)books that somehow isn’t captured by current forms of measurement.” […]

This is a rather weak hypothesis. ISBNs capture large, medium, and small publishers and a significant number of self publishers, which add up to a fairly sizable n-value. To say the book world suddenly behaves differently outside that group is perplexing, especially when no one has noticed. True, 30% of ebooks have no ISBNs, but ISBNs indicate titles, not units sold. I doubt any significant sales from the majority of Kindle self-published titles–perhaps in the single copies. When one single Steven King tile could outsell 250,000 self-published books, unit sales matter. Yes, there are Kindle millionaires, but they are outliers–they also are usually signed to major publishers. If this “dark” ebook market was so lucrative, I would imagine we would be reading about it in the Sunday edition of the NYT.

Note: I am a self-publisher. If there is a mysterious underground ebook market, I have never found it.

Quote: But he also admitted, according to a Times-Picayune report, that “no one thinks there will be a lot of print around in 40 years.”

Funny, when I look at myself, I seem to be there. If I go out into the sun, I cast a shadow. The IRS would certainly get upset if I quit paying taxes. But there it is: “no one thinks” what I clearly think, therefore I must not exist.

Actually, such people mistake ‘no one they know’ for ‘no one.’ Their lives lack richness and diversity. There’s a host of reasons that print books will be around in substantial numbers in 2055. Our massive existing inventory is one. Made well, a book can last for a century or more. Another is the need for reading that’s not dependent on costly and prone-to-fail devices. In a messy kitchen, a cookbook is far better than an iPad.

This essay makes a very important point that just can’t be ignored by anyone who is serious about the book world as we move forward. I read everything from classic literature, WattPad fiction, Amazon/Kobo/B&N e-books, Smashword books, stuff from Tablo.io, Tomely, and tons of short and long work downloaded directly from authors and indie publishers. All on my phone, my iPad, my Kindle, my MacBook and even through AppleTV.

More interesting to me is how author websites can integrate with books and how over the next decade this next generation (and the one coming behind them) will perform reading tasks in multiple platforms on the fly.

And I don’t think any of this means an end to paperbound books at all. It’s likely that most genre books and text books will be digital by, say 2025, but quality work that you will want to keep or give as a gift will always have a home as a piece (literally) of art.

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